As wildfires burn across Siberia for a third straight month, the cloud of soot and smoke that billows above the region is set to break a land area record.

According to Radio Free Liberty, about 5.5 million hectares of land are on fire in Siberia, with clouds of smoke covering more than five million square kilometres. The area is larger than the size of the European Union, the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization said in a tweet on Monday.

The scale of the Siberian wildfires is underlined by this animation of the huge area of the smoke cloud: more than 5 million km². For comparison, the EU is about 4.5 million km² and the contiguous US about 8.1 million km². (Via @anttilip of @IlmaTiede)pic.twitter.com/RDhntqaDEO